Samsung Display seems to be making some pretty major investments in OLED laptop displays. Recently, the company showed off an under-display camera for laptops that was enabled by its OLED panels, and today, it announced another first - a 90Hz OLED display for laptops.
Now, high refresh rates are nowhere near new to laptops, and we have some devices going up as high as 300Hz refresh rates for their screens. However, all of those panels are LCD, and OLED panels for laptops are all still 60Hz. This is somewhat similar to what we saw happening with phones a few years ago. The Razer Phone was one of the first phones to have a 120Hz refresh rate, but it was LCD. The first high-refresh-rate OLED phones aimed for 90Hz, though we"ve seen it go up from that quickly.
According to Samsung, OLED displays offer a higher response speed than LCD panels - as much as 10 times higher - so the 90Hz OLED actually feels smoother than a 120Hz LCD. The firm tested screen drag when moving a window around at high speeds on the aforementioned types of displays, and it measured a 0.9mm drag on the 90Hz OLED, versus 1mm on the 120Hz LCD.
Samsung says its 90Hz OLED laptop displays will go into full production in March, after which point we should start seeing them in new devices. However, even regular OLED displays aren"t all that common on laptops, so it"s up in the air how many devices will actually make use of these panels.